Voices
by Struthious
Summary: Caroline was lost beneath a flood of constant, meaningless, artificial voices. Doug Rattman could sympathize. Oneshot, Portal 2, spoiler warning


"It's alright, Doug," his Companion whispered to him, and the man extended a shaky hand to pat it on the side. He couldn't help but notice how bony his own wrists had become, his fingertips starkly pale beside so much dirt-streaked skin. "I'm still here for you. None of this was your fault."

"Of course it was," he replied, eyes misting over, "I started the whole damn thing."

* * *

><p>When Doug Rattman was eighteen, he had a breakdown. His freshman year of college was an absolute disaster; midway through term he abruptly stopped attending class, barricading himself inside his flat and holding lengthy philosophical debates with his bedside table. He'd become quite good friends with the television, too, yet the machine had to be unplugged and thrown out the window when it began selling his secrets to his neighbors.<p>

That was when they'd had him see a therapist. If the television hadn't nearly landed on somebody, he may have gone unnoticed for months. _It's funny_, he'd thought once the medication started to silence the voices, _how the most paranoid guy on the planet can simultaneously be the least important_.

* * *

><p>Originally, GLaDOS had been built for the very mundane purpose of deicing fuel lines. That was the project Doug had signed up for. His off the charts IQ and diagnosis of acute-onset paranoid schizophrenia had made him, in the words of one career counselor who hadn't supposed he was listening, "practically unemployable in any imaginable capacity". Her recommendation had been, on first glance, quite damning. It was only by sheer luck that he ended up working in a cubicle at a lonely northern outpost with little sunlight and even less human contact - it may not have done wonders for his complexion, yet Doug had never enjoyed his work more. It was simple, it was practical, it was concrete.<p>

It had been his idea to integrate an artificial conscience into the robot. He supposed it would provide a simple black and white, right and wrong system of values. Either the lines were clogged to the point where they required the time and effort needed to deice them, or they could wait. No human monitoring required; failing mechanical breakdown, GLaDOS could live forever at the outpost.

It was when Aperture became involved that the project went wrong, and now Caroline was dead.

* * *

><p><em>"Brain mapping. Artificial intelligence. We should have been working on it thirty years ago. I will say this, and I'm gonna say it on tape so everybody hears it a hundred times a day: if I die before you people can pour me into a computer, I want Caroline to run this place. Now, she'll argue, she'll say she can't, she's modest like that. But you make her! Hell, put her in my computer. I don't care."<em>

* * *

><p>The instructions had been very specific, and so Caroline had been sedated. Like Cave predicted, she had protested, but when it became clear her own opinion was meaningless she conceded to the project with dignity.<p>

There was a name on the woman's lips as she closed her eyes, something soft and monosyllabic, but Doug couldn't properly hear over the humming of his own baby. GLaDOS emitted a low, vibrating sound as she came to life inside her new home. If Doug hadn't adamantly denied non-human objects any human characteristics (of course he had to - after all, he was on medication for that particular problem, thank you very much), he would have called that sound "happy". The Aperture facility had been very accommodating, he had to admit - no expense had been spared creating a home for the behemoth of a computer. With such a large chamber surrounding it, all white tile and pristine surfaces, he could almost forget the woman laying motionless beneath the suspended machine.

"All systems go."

"Green light. Begin transfer."

* * *

><p>They'd incinerated the woman's body once her heart had stopped beating. Doug privately supposed Caroline would have wanted to be buried alongside her husband, but the orders had been very clear: if the GLaDOS project was a failure, no word of it would ever reach the outside world. Particularly not the part of the outside world that was under observation by Black Mesa.<p>

"Failure" was a mild word for what had occurred. "Failure" somehow failed to encompass the hiss of steam emerging from GLaDOS's control console, the frantic beeping of every screen as the transfer line cut out, the quiet gasp of Caroline as her brain activity went dead, the way the entire chamber trembled as GLaDOS came undone.

Dead._ Dead, dead, dead._ Doug popped another pill and stared into the mirror, his own eyes haunted. Caroline was dead.

"It's alright," his toothbrush murmured, consoling, comforting. It sounded a little like his mother. He threw it out the window.

* * *

><p>"Doug, come here, you've gotta see this - she's alive!"<p>

* * *

><p>The neurotoxin had definitely not been his idea. Picoseconds after being awoken, GLaDOS had tried to access the neurotoxin mainframe. It was only with some quick reprogramming, an emergency reboot, and a cleverly-applied paperclip that Doug and his team were able to abort the computer's mission and shut it back down.<p>

"Somebody should do something about that toxin," he'd remarked to a fellow lab technician, a friend of his.

"I'll get right on it," the man promised, and nothing was ever done.

* * *

><p><em>"Bring Your Daughter To Work Day is a perfect time to have her tested!"<em>

* * *

><p>They'd fixed GLaDOS. It had taken months of work, and many sacrifices, but they'd done it.<p>

Morality cores. Maybe in the past Doug would have objected to the idea of transferring employee's intelligences to smaller computers, with the aim of controlling the bigger one, but Doug didn't much mind now. Maybe it was because the smaller cores were human beings, too. They spoke to him every bit as clearly as they spoke to GLaDOS, and he knew - oh, how well he knew! - that there was no possible way she could function beneath their constant chatter.

He didn't turn GLaDOS on, that fateful day. He'd been far away, asleep; told the tech boys to wait, but they hadn't listened. Apparently a few of them had wanted to impress their daughters, and thrown the switch early.

It wasn't paranoid that he made a habit of napping in a test chamber with an air-proof door and separate oxygen supply, he'd told himself. It was practical.

He wished with all his heart that he had not been right. Doug awoke from his afternoon rest that day to find a facility absolutely devoid of life and utterly sealed off from the outside world. The faintest traces of neurotoxin still clung to the air.

* * *

><p>A single light, in the very first test chamber.<p>

"It's time to go, Doug," his Companion sang softly, and he gave a nod. His thoughts swirled around like his brains had been thrown into a blender, whispering like a thousand different conflicting morality cores, so to steady himself he took inventory one last time. Several canisters of paint, whisked away from an abandoned storeroom and kept in careful order (or what he supposed was careful order; to his fragmented mind, they may as well have grown feet and begun to tap dance). Several stashes of canned food and water taken from the emergency stockpiles in the bowels of the facility (Cave Johnson had been a paranoid man, convinced that the end of the world was always nigh). And, in his right pocket, one last pair of pills. He swallowed them dry, gave his Companion a gentle kiss, and got ready to move.

He had started the whole damn thing, and only with her help would it end.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's Note<strong>: Yeah, it's another Portal fanfic - you can blame Valve for creating such a beautiful world. This is definitely going to stay a oneshot; found Rattman's last chamber in-game two days ago, and it's lingered with me ever since. Had to write this, hope you enjoyed it!


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